Siege of Foleith
House Dagmyr |side2= |commanders1=Lord Commander Tholt Reslan |commanders2 =Yucahu Sumakutaa |forces1=(To be added) |forces2=(To be added) |casual1=(To be added) |casual2=(To be added) }} The Siege of Foleith was an offensive by Insurrectionist forces, primarily Army regiments backed by House Dagmyr, against a coalition of Loyalist Army units, which took place early on in the Wars of Expansion. The Insurrectionists pressed their advantage inexorably, but were taken by surprise by a large force of Void Eagles led by Yucahu Sumakutaa and destroyed in short order. The Forlorn Garrison Along the border between Icarion's territory and the Emperor’s, beyond the territory deemed defensible by the Loyalist high command, pockets of resistance remained, resolving to hold as best they could and slow the enemy. Once such guttering fire in the dark was Foleith, a fortress world to which several tattered fleets had flocked. Isolated as they were, they did not warrant the attention of a massed Legion force when these were needed to press further towards Terra. Instead command was given to Lord Commander Tholt Reslan, who had commanded the 3146th Expeditionary Fleet. With two cohorts of Solar Auxilia, Legio Cybernetica maniples and a host of the Knight House Dagmyr, this force was deemed quite enough to grind out what remained of the resistance. Certainly, they made short work of the Loyalist fleet. Reslan’s flagship, the Krommagbane, was a true behemoth, reclaimed from a space hulk for a brutal war against the Orks some hundred and ten years ago. Few fleets in the Galaxy could boast such a monstrous ship, and in just a few short hours the defending fleet was broken, the few survivors scattering to the outer dark. Eight days of probing and bombardment against the four fortress-hives of Foleith followed. Each attack strained the cities’ void shields further, killed a few hundred more soldiers, did more damage to the defence batteries that snapped at bomber wings. The Loyalist’s tenacity was truly heroic, dozens of disparate, weary armies standing firm against their inevitable doom. But inevitable it remained, and the missives dispatched by the world’s Astropaths were merely a valediction, telling the Imperium of the sacrifices made on Foleith. On the ninth day, the Insurrectionists began escalade operations against two of the great fortresses, their landers flocking to the captured spaceports and unloading hundreds of thousands of soldiers. They were fresh to battle, their weapons pristine and their tank squadrons far more numerous and varied than those of the defenders, whose super-heavies had largely been abandoned on other worlds. On their heels came the Knights of Dagmyr, whose indigo-hued walkers waded into the fray with imperious disdain, sowing deaths by the score with every salvo and cleaving through tank armour with their chainswords. The Wings Unfurled In the dying hours of the eleventh day, as the Insurrectionists pressed towards the control spires of the breached hives and broke open the wall of another with a mass of siege tanks, a fleet emerged into the system. Legiones Astartes vessels, their number consistent with a large Chapter. Reslan, overseeing operations on the surface, was surprised by this development, but initially put it down to the delays he had suffered - not intolerable, but unwelcome given the urgency of the campaign. He and his staff expected that these were representatives of the Stormlord, likely the Drowned or the Grave Stalkers by their imperious silence. His prestige would suffer for their presence, but at least it would bring a swift end to the conquest. It was then an unwelcome development when the incoming fleet suddenly assumed an attack vector. Reaching auspex range, their colours caused bafflement until they were identified as the Second Great Fleet of the IVth Legion. Its flagship was a fifteen-kilometre slice of jagged brass named the Sky Walker, justly famed among the Imperium’s armadas. Reslan was sanguine as he weighed the odds. The Insurrectionist fleet was well-armed, and the Krommagbane was mighty, its guns and armour the match of the Sky Walker. The Void Eagles were outnumbered and their ships bore scars from the Day of Revelation. Moreover, Reslan knew that Acao Culica, the old master of the Second Great Fleet, was dead, his warriors bereft of his expertise. The Eagles were here, the Lord Commander and his fleetmasters concluded, to do what damage they could before destruction took them. To serve them that doom would be costly, but the glory of destroying a Loyalist Chapter of Astartes was a prospect they would not have dared imagine before. Therefore the Insurrectionist fleet assumed a defensive formation with as much relish as mortal troops have ever shown in confronting the Angels of Death. Thus a deception was achieved by the Void Eagles, and with one hand on display, the hidden blade moved into place. From the inner system, hurtling on a slingshot course, came something brass-hulled and titanic, cannons sliding into place along its flanks as lances began to fizz with electricity. In its wake came three hundred more vessels, the First and Tenth Great Fleets, which only underlined the death sentence. Their surprise had been achieved through pure mastery of voidwar, for the commander on this fleet admitted no equal in this sphere. The Ala Lux brought its engines to full burn, and the fate of the Insurrectionist fleet was sealed. Brazen Talons Much of the fleet behind the Ala Lux did not follow it into the fray, but struck instead the ships still grappling with the defenders. They made little effort to shield their allies, instead plunging into the Insurrectionist formations and leaving charred wreckage in their wake. Then thousands of drop-pods were launched and hundreds of gunships took wing, streaking down into the atmosphere to where fighting still raged. The Ala Lux had little need of support in this battle. Nothing was its equal here, flagship of Yucahu Sumakutaa, butcher of planets. Like the Legion’s namesake it fell upon the Krommagbane from above, bursting its shields and then opening fiery gashes in its shell with lance strikes and unloading macrocannons into the towers running along its back. The Krommagbane was lamed, and minutes later the Sky Walker finished the job, leaving the monster to drift lifeless in the void as the fleet around it was taken apart. Ramius Osaun, Culica’s successor, had gained his first great kill as master of the Second. Below, the Insurrectionists tried to reorient their forces to face the attack to come. At the one hive whose void shields still held, the Void Eagles did not deign to face them, wiping two million men from the surface with plasma blasts that glassed sixty square kilometres of earth. Where fighting had raged through two hives before, it was redoubled. Gunships swooped in, unloading their heavy bolters into the packed ranks of soldiers. Knights and tanks, hemmed in by the press of troops around them, became prey for Fire Raptor Destroyers, their Neutron Beam Lasers searing through ceramite and adamantium. Void Eagle Corsairs led despoilers into the mass of enemies. Assault marines plunged into the ranks from above, their mere passage killing dozens as they crushed men underfoot and set others ablaze with the blasts of their jump packs. Flamers lit up, acrid jets whipping through the ranks and sending soldiers writhing, attempting to flee but caught in the crush of their comrades. In the lower levels, with more room for the Insurrectionists to manoeuvre, the fighting was more mobile, but the bulk of their forces were hemmed in by the structure of the hive and the pressure of their own numbers. Panic spread, and a dragging siege became a massacre. Between the thunder of cannon and the savagery of chainblade, flamer and bolter, what were already bloodied plazas and thoroughfares became nothing so much as swamps of viscera and ash. At the last hive, battle only gripped the outer precincts of the city, and much of the invading force remained on the great muster field beside the spaceport. Yucahu’s response was blunt and uncompromising, directed at this location. Drop-pods screamed into the skies above the fields, and struck in their hundreds, pulping men where they struck. They had been unleashed with an accuracy that even other Legions would have struggled to match, striking to the rear of the Army. The Insurrectionists had deployed the vast bulk of their heavy armour and Knights into the city, but this worked in their favour, for on the field they had some room to reform, even as those units close to the Astartes were sacrificed. There was not the crush that had doomed their armies elsewhere. Their second wave also had large numbers of Armoured Sentinel walkers and Hectarion Main Battle Tanks. These moved towards the drop-pods, ready to smite whatever might emerge. The Sentinels in particular were fleet for such powerful machines, and their heavy weapons made them more than a match for a Space Marine strike force. Or so their commanders believed. Figures emerged from the drop-pods, so huge that at first they appeared to be automata until they roared out their Legion’s warcry. They were encased in armour whose pauldrons had fused, encompassing the warriors’ heads and topped with heavy cannon which matched those in their armoured hands. These weapons immediately answered the guns of the enemy, and all was blood and fire. The Saturator squads of the IVth Legion were named for their brutal purpose, and the Sentinels may as well have been a screen of paper against them. The soldiers behind the squadrons of walkers saw them stagger and begin a torturous dance under the withering firestorm. They were still being driven toward the front line when it was overtaken, the slayers looming through the smoke and flames. Devastators and Dreadnoughts joined them, and the tanks met a torrent of fire that stripped their armour away and left guttering wrecks. Where the Saturators turned their guns, nothing survived. More Void Eagles came after them, Moritats and Destroyer squads prowling at the edges of companies, Dreadnoughts towering over anything else, slamming into the few tanks that remained and spilling their mechanical innards with claws and power fists, trampling the wreckage into the dirt. Thunderhawks and Stormbirds descended, delivering more Legionaries alongside squadrons of Sicaran Venators and Predators armed both for destroying tanks and wiping out infantry. But the true death knell came as twenty Stormbirds - the dreaded Apophis pattern, kings of the sky - flew down, and the Primarch of the IVth Legion leapt from a landing ramp. His deadliest close-combat fighters followed, and when Yucahu brandished his roaring spear they broke into a charge. All that remained now was for the slaughter to run its course. The thousands-strong spearhead swelled, fed by Stormbirds until forty thousand Astartes trod the blasted ferrocrete, and Yucahu fought at their head, swinging his dreaded Hullbreaker in shrieking arcs. Men within reach of the chainspear may as well have been cast into a threshing machine, and if they were spared its destroying edge then they were swatted aside, bones pulverised. His Firebrand cadre guarded his flanks, and even the Ogryn Charonites set against the Primarch fell with little effort, torn open and crushed by his blows. In six and a half hours, the last invasion force was broken. The two Solar Auxilia cohorts stood and died, mowed down by the Primarch and his favoured companies. A few hundred men from lesser bodies escaped the slaughter and fled into the depths of the hive, casting aside weapons and uniforms in their efforts to disappear. Reslan, whose body was never identified, is thought to have been among them. Yucahu sent no hunting parties after them, but that was nothing more than a stay of execution. Unbeknownst to any outside the IVth Legion, sentence had already been passed on the planet itself.' ' Salted Earth and Flame To the surviving defenders, Yucahu offered no grand oratory. His words were curt orders and statements. Foleith would not be saved, and its fortresses destroyed to deny their use to the enemy. If the soldiers who had fought for it desired further life and fruitful struggle, they would find it under Yucahu's command, and in their coordination and valour he did find something to admire. More importantly, it was a weapon he might yet make use of. Over a day and a night, Foleith was emptied of Imperial personnel and all weaponry that could be retrieved and repaired, with several captured Insurrectionist ships given over to the less ravaged regiments. Others were absorbed into the already mongrel serf forces on the IVth Legion’s own ships, or broken down and recombined. A worthy addition to the defenders of Segmentum Solar. Hundreds of millions of hive-dwellers, however, could not be evacuated in time, with order giving way to anarchy as they realised the Primarch had no intention of delivering them. In the pitiless mind of Yucahu, they were a resource that he could not profit from, and so they became something else to deny his foes. The magi who had watched over the systems at the heart of Foleith’s cities now set the reactors to overload before the last transports withdrew. Under the Void Eagles’ stony gaze, the cities were blotted from the planet's surface, soon obscured by the smaller, more numerous explosions of enemy ships that could not be made voidworthy soon enough. Stripped of ammunition and set to perish in low orbit, they would complete the nuclear winter and leave only a Dead World in orbit. Yucahu and his forces passed out of the system, and soon a conquered agri-world was burned and barren, while another Insurrectionist army was caught and destroyed as it pressed its advantage on a minor Forge World. Again, the only deliverance the Starborn would grant entailed service in his ugly, pragmatic war. A band of charred and ransacked worlds, which would would come to mark the Border, began to grow in the overlapping shadows of the two empires. On hearing of the battle, Alexandros wrote “It is now, as we tarnish the Imperium’s sheen to preserve the structure, that this Age of Darkness begins in earnest. The Crusade was but the dawning, but I fear that it will seem as brightest day when the night takes hold.” Category:Void Battle Category:Wars of Expansion